Back to Basics

That's all that matters right now.

A woodland scene at the parking area for the Birdwatchers Trail in the Big Thicket National Preserve’s Menard Creek Corridor Unit. Phlox in the herbaceous layer up front, with Virginia creeper and other grasses. A poison ivy vine crawls up the left side of the tree (probably a water oak, yes, based on the leaf litter) and a cross vine (Bignonia capreolata) crawling up the center and right side of the tree.

The last few nights I’ve turned to an adult coloring book and a box of Kuretake Zig markers that I’d been saving for a “special occasion” or “the right art project”, pressed play on an audiobook or my favorite playlist, and colored for several hours in the evening. I got the idea from an internet acquaintance who recently posted about cozy hobbies she did and I couldn’t get over the fact that, of course, coloring was the answer.

I cannot focus on anything right now. Make original art? Requires thinking. Write? Requires thinking. Reading? Requires monotasking and my brain is incapable of that or the other option is just to fall asleep as I’m reading. Even editing photos is too difficult of a task for me and that’s pretty easy! I get to sort through the photos of beautiful plants and scenes I’ve comes across, which sounds delightful and is, but it’s the sheer volume of photos I take that suddenly becomes daunting.

Everything feels difficult.

So, I turned to coloring. I’m doing something and also keeping my brain entertained while listening to music or an audiobook (currently: The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende) and then my brain is soothed and isn’t thinking of the many tasks I need to do or the deep doom of the state of the world. I’ve typically used colored pencils when I’ve sporadically colored in the handful of books I have for this activity, but I reached for the Zigs and have been rewarded. Some of the pens have ink that isn’t quite as juicy and they scratch the paper in a way that is irksome. Others have ink that flows out in such a way that is so satisfying that I want to wrap up the feeling and keep it for when I need something to calm my brain. The world is ending? I’ll dredge up the feeling of how the magenta-purple flowed onto the paper as I filled in the outlines of a peony.

All of this is to say, I’m really stuck right now. I’m getting by with regularly riding my bike around the neighborhood after a few years off from doing that, and by gardening, and apparently now, by coloring. I’m still hiking almost every weekend so I can to wrap up trails and parks for my book and I’m getting closer to the end. The one thing about being closer to the end is that I feel like I still don’t know enough about the Big Thicket, and I mean that in more of an intimate sense—I’ve been hiking but haven’t spent years and seasons knowing the ins and outs of what happens in each of these places I’m attempting to showcase to y’all. I am noticing how varied the various tracts are and delight in getting a sense in how habitat changes from place to place. I have a pile of reading I need to do, which is why I’m trying to get my brain back. Never mind the actual writing and map making that needs to happen. Ah, to be one of those privileged male writers of yesteryear (or current year in some cases) who shut themselves off in a room and had a wife or maid or *insert any woman* who fed them, kept the kids entertained, and sometimes paid the bills. Alas, I am not any of those men but plenty of women have built writing empires in between the jobs, kids, marriages, friends, hobbies, and even societal collapse, so I guess I can too! This is just to say, the struggle is real and we’re all out there trying to make it through. Sometimes we have to pause and do other things for a while.

You know what is the worst thing about all of this?

I gave myself the BEST BOOK IDEA on Monday. I’m not even going to talk about it because I do not have time to deal with it right now and already have a half finished novel and at least one memoir I am trying to write in addition to this current contracted book, and meanwhile I’m spending my time coloring right now, so…*throws hands in the air*, ahhhhhh!

However, I’m pretty sure I’m going to turn it into a book proposal this fall. It needs to marinate for a bit. In Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, I learned not to let ideas go or someone else will catch them and make them their own. I was shown how accurate this was a few weeks ago when I saw that Austin gardener and garden writer Pam Penick had a new book coming out soon called Gardens of Texas: Visions of Resilience from the Lone Star State and it killed me because I wanted to write that book about five years ago. I’d been inspired by some fairly spectacular native plant/gardening landscape books from other regions of the country and always felt like Texas got the shaft because we fit into so many different types of regions. Yes, sometimes a Texas garden would appear in these books but it was almost an afterthought. I even wrote the book idea down in my always growing list of things I’d like to write, gave some thought to a few gardeners I could pitch to be in the proposal and seriously contemplated it. But I knew it would be difficult to pull off and tabled it. While I’m not the creator of this book, I’m really glad that Pam did it and it couldn’t have been done by a more competent writer with the capacity to accomplish such a breathtaking book (my judgement based off of the few images on the publisher’s website—now I need to look for an ARC).

Right now maybe my brain can’t tackle the state of the environmental world, from the “resurrection” of long extinct species when we can’t even adequately protect our current endangered species to the implications of executive orders to log our national forests, but I can at least work out some of the kinks in the knots of these issues in my brain while I’m quietly coloring inside the lines. Eventually I’ll be able to draw outside the lines, to create for myself again, and to weave together the thoughts and feelings I have about everything that is happening right now.

It might take a few more coloring pages, though.